The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some existing products offer a comprehensive architecture for electronic document creation, collaboration, and process management. In the context of such architecture, a user may initiate a workflow by distributing an electronic form to a group of participants and then be able to collect the filled out forms from the participants. The participants, in turn, may fill out the form and submit the filled-out form to the initiator of the workflow. In order to access and fill out an electronic form, a participant may utilize an authoring application or a viewing application, such as Adobe® Reader® software.
Workflow participants who do not have direct access to a database and have intermittent Internet access, may have to resort to printing and mailing paper forms to the “home office,” where the data provided by such participant must be re-keyed in order to be fed into a database.